12/18/2016

On Obama's Three Failures

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

President Obama succeeded in two out of three key, instrumental aims of any American President: to win power and to get re-elected. He failed at the non-trivial third aim: to pass on or leave power to a candidate friendly to his policies. (There should be a Machiavelli quote to support the general thought avant la lettre, but I can't remember it.) The proximate cause of this failure is due to his strange willingness to emulate his predecessor, President Bush (43), and run and stick with a Vice-President who, regardless of his other merits, could not for all intents and purposes succeed him. This strategic failure is surprising because President Obama has been interpreted as especially strong on thinking through the long game (see, for example, Andrew Sullivan). While the first law of politics is that nothing lasts, it is also true that some stuff can last longer than others. For, whatever President Obama hoped to achieve in the medium-to-long-run requires institutions, norms, and people to protect and develop his legacy.

My suspicion is that President Obama failed to recognize the challenge, when he was still in the position to do something about it, because of his own commitment to a progressive understanding of history. This commitment is expressed in his 2012 political slogan (forward), his defense of Hillary Clinton ("progress is on the ballot"),* and, especially, in his inaugural address (quoted above). For, while Obama explicitly recognizes that our collective "destiny" is "uncertain," he is committed to the idea that truthful values and duties, which he claims are "the quiet force of progress," have as an expected by-product success.

His mistake here is that these values (honesty, hard work, courage, fair play, tolerance, curiosity, loyalty, and patriotism) only reliably and regularly produce successworth having in the context of reasonably well-functioning institutions, including the institution of justice. In other contexts these may well be foolish or promote, say, fanatical ends.** But if you think that such success is a to-be-expected reward and reliable by-product of the energetic and dutiful exercise of these 'truthful' values, you are likely to fail to recognize that their outcome may also be dependent on, let's say, more hidden forces, less noble values, or even luck.

Perhaps, the previous paragraph is wrong. Perhaps, Obama's failure was just a matter of inexperience. But what is manifest is that the moment Hillary Clinton was nominated it was clear the final destiny of his Presidency was out of his hands. (That's, of course, compatible with the thought that a victory by her would have been better for the survival of his projects.) For all their shared policy-ends, she represents different would-be symbolic achievements and, more importantly, a return to Wall Street's preeminence in politics that voters had rejected in his initial victory. And this gets me to his second failure: Obama understood himself, I think, as the person who could provide "a watchful eye" to Wall Street, and ensure "the market" would not "spin out of control;" that he couldprotect citizens from Wall Street and ensure that Wall Street would continue to flourish. For all I know this is a winning economic formula and generates both jobs and donations from Wall Street; but it's not a winning political formula among a population that is asked to sacrifice while the bankers are bailed out and left to keep their bonuses.

The final failure is Obama's disastrous foreign policy. In his efforts not to repeat the blunders of his predecessor, who had a fondness for grotesque wars of choice, Obama ended up potentially fatally undermining Pax Americana, squandering the Arab Spring (and facilitating a return to dictatorship in Egypt) and being witness to murderous campaigns by our nominal allies (e.g., Saudi Arabia in Yemen) as well as fuelling a brutal civil war (Syria) for no political gain and at great human cost. Meanwhile, NATO is close to imploding and a would-be-ally, Ukraine, was dismembered. After eight years, Obama is party to the remarkable fact that Putin's Russia -- an aging country with an economy the size of the Netherlands, but willing to step into the vacuum Obama permitted -- is seen as a great power able to shape the destiny of the world.

Comments

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I think this is basically right and insightful except for the bit about foreign policy. I worry that there are just too many counterfactuals we don't know and that blaming Obama too much here plays into a mythic overestimation of the amount of power really possessed by United States Presidents.

Could Obama really stop weapon sales to Saudi Arabia right now as they pulverize the people of Yemen? To Israel? I doubt it very much. Most of Congress is paid by the military contractors to support this kind of thing, and anyone with decision making powers in the military and federal government end up making bank working for contractors and lobbyists after they "retire," as long as they've played along. And Obama already expended more political capital in the Iran negotiations than he really had.

American foreign policy is wholly irrational. We support the Sunni powers and Israel through massive arms sales, giveaways, and diplomatic coverage while at the same time achieving victories for Shiite powers (by crippling Afghanistan and the Sunnis in Iraq and now fighting ISIS). This strategic incoherence predated Obama and will clearly postdate him (note how Trump has appointed both fanatically pro-Russian and fanatically anti-Iranian people to positions of great power). I think that future historians will just see the United States as an agent of violent chaos during this period of history. Some of them will follow the principle of charity and assume that that was the point.

In any case, part of what is distasteful about Hillary to many of us is that she was such a cheerleader for an activist foreign policy, but if I'm reading you correctly you are suggesting that things would be better if Obama had not been a check on this kind of thinking.

I'm not saying that the opposite is true. [Sometimes it clearly is. We (and others) are reaping the whirlwind arising out of our having meddled in the Ukraine. I don't know if the Libya thing is as much of a fiasco as conservatives allege.] What I'm saying is that I don't think we really know. We have the dimmest of ideas of what is really possible for a U.S. President to achieve, given all of the institutional pressures, and we have the dimmest of ideas of what actions would in fact produce much worse outcomes.

But I do think you are spot on about Obama's misplaced faith in teleology and I think it's very plausible that this might be responsible for the undoing of all of the good he has helped achieve. Of course if he didn't have that misplaced faith he probably wouldn't have been able to help achieve that good in the first place. . .